Opening Symposium of the Research Project Studies in Remoteness (2026-2028)

Almost any place on this planet labelled “remote” by one person is to another an intimate home. Almost any stranger met on the street is, to someone, a most intimate friend. No place or person, then, is ontologically remote. Instead, remoteness emerges as a condition paired with its opposite. Remoteness is duplicit.

This opening symposium of the collaborative research project Studies in Remoteness explores remoteness as connected with duality, in-between spaces, self-conflicted states, and epistemic ambiguity. We will examine remoteness as a way of being situated (perhaps conflictedly) between apparently different identities, geographies, and epistemologies. Even as the word ‘duplicity’ suggests masked deceitfulness, its implication of the two-sided and two-faced provides a means to query the dichotomies (distant and near, intimate and stranger) experienced by those labelled “remote”.

Duplicity often carries connotations of trickery – as a disguise that renders the reality of a person or situation inaccessible; remote. The term duplicity thus gestures toward performance. Yet, acts of pretend, staging, or performance aren’t merely façades behind which reality lurks; they also offer ways of conjuring real contexts for social engagement. As anthropologist David Graeber described, politics is a fundamental social imaginary – “that dimension of social life in which things really do become true if enough people believe them” – but to participate effectively, one must never acknowledge this fact (2011: 94). Graeber used this assertion to connect politics to artistic practice, further arguing that, “for the art world to recognize itself as a form of politics is also to recognize itself as something both magical, and a confidence game – a kind of scam” (ibid). While the term “scam” typically implies deceit or fraud, this symposium considers the “scam” as a kind of strategic duplicity that enables both art and politics to function – not in spite of, but through their resistance to absolute transparency. The imagined, the artificial, and the staged become crucial mechanisms by which social and political truths take shape.

This symposium includes reflections on duplicity as an aesthetic, ethical, constructive, and political practice: how it structures relations of trust and suspicion, performance and belief, transparency and opacity. Presenters explore the multiple registers of duplicity, and interrogate its role in shaping both everyday life and collective futures.

Finalized programme forthcoming.

About Studies in Remoteness: Sensorial of absence, distance, and neglect

Studies in Remoteness does foundational theoretical, artistic, and historical work toward initiating a new field of interdisciplinary research in critical remoteness studies. To unpack the geopolitical, environmental, and cultural dimensions of ‘remoteness’ – particularly, in the circumpolar North – we center Indigenous scholarship and critiques of extractive colonialism, as well as artistic and embodied approaches, in a series of six symposia across the Baltic rim between 2026-2028.

The project turns its attention to regional peripheries or cartographic borderlands between nation states; the residential areas of Indigenous and minoritized communities; historical testimonies and lacunae; sub-cultural meeting spots, or your neighbour’s kitchen.… Theorizing modernity by turning to its so-called outskirts, the project inquires sensoria of absence, distance, and neglect that have blossomed along the frontiers of colonial empires and sedimented among the margins of modern infrastructures of “global connectivity”. With lingering attention, Studies in Remoteness intends to unsettle conditions of obscuring or exoticising – resolutely acknowledging histories, topographies and epistemologies with an eye to how these might come into “intense proximity”, as coined by Okwui Enwezor.

Studies in Remoteness is coordinated within the Nordic Summer University by the scholar Lindsey Drury and artistic researcher Helena Hildur W., in cooperation with project members Tinka Harvard, Shiluinla Jamir, and Essi Nuutinen, in cooperation with Karolina Enquist Källgren (Stockholm University/Nordic Summer University), Stéphanie Barillé (Nordic Summer University), among others.